Ok so my first impression of the test is on a positive note, a lot of nice new features and changes. It looks and feels "sharp" as well as more modern. I'm not sure I like not being able to see my crew in the main hangar window, but that's something I would get used to , I suggest a visual showing the crew but not allowing a player to edit/change the crew, without going to the crew tab.

My first round was not bad in standard battle, I liked the transparency of enemy units, the new info at the pre-battle screen, and in the target window. My only concern is the FOV it increase your FOV but does not increase the distance between the camera and your aircraft. The zooming out to the max leaves you to close to your aircraft at any angle of FOV.

Also the tracers are way off, they start from way behind your aircraft and actually block your view because the camera is so close to the aircraft.

I used the Red tracers/bullets mod in order to show the extent of this. No enemies are shooting at me these bullets are from my aircraft only.

Same thing in this image no enemy is shooting at me. The 2nd shot shows it at a different angle.

That crew tab is a terrible idea. Everything else seems ok. Not sure about the GT, but I don't really fly a lot of GA planes.

Oh...the crew tab...

This.Is.The.Worst.Idea.Ever. Not even hiding the barracks in the past is comparable to this foolishness. Now it takes extra window to move crews around...and I do that a lot.

But hey, at least "Crew Incomplete" is added, and that's a step ahead. Individual aircrafts' achievements is a step forward too.

I'll be back later...

WoWP makes a great jousting game...especially with the 262 and people busy in furballs...
I am deaf, silent, and fly with unrealistic controls. Do not count on me to carry - my back's already broken from overweight.

The camera zoom function is a wonderful addition. You can now set a view similar to a fish eye lense. This allows for better pariferal vision and hopefully less collisions with your teammates in close quarters dogfighting.

I do fly by mouse and keyboard. (I have a nice Seitek joystick setup, but I find the free look with the mouse is too important to give up)

Mouse control is a little easier to set up. The layout is logical and I only had to make a few tweaks to get it where I wanted. The old graph to set up the vector control is on a new tab now but works the same.

I do believe mouse control is more predictable now, but not to the point to where joystick users should be worried.

The pre launch screen is great. The new comparison tool is much improved. The breakdown comparison is better to read and looks great also.

I believe the matching system works better. I never find myself in a match where I'm wondering how close to instant will I go down in a blazing fireball. But the matches are so small it's hard to tell for certain.

The new mission play style works well. I like it very much. Basically, the superiority meter is running all the time and is easy to see where your team stands.

I don’t fly Ground Assault planes, but I have taken several wacks at ground targets. You need be be much more controled and pick out your micro target.

As a side note. It feels like AA is more powerful now. It's more important than ever to be sure you face enemies in safe skies. (As it should be. This is an important part of game strategy. )

The worst part of game play now are the pop up rewards. It's not the reward piping up that's the issue, it's the sound the accompanies it. Turn that ching sound down or better yet go with a pleasant chime. It's a reward. Make it pleasant to win, it shouldn't sound like you've just been torpedoed.

I've been flying several planes especially the ones that are supposed to have new tweaks. (P38F and P38J and also the pancake) they all feels better to fly.

I'm a big fan of American planes, and sadly I have to say that the whole American line is still poorly represented.

The Corsair line should be a little faster with a little more firepower. (Not too bad overall.)

The p38's should be more agile with better climb.

The worst is still the poor mustangs. I don’t know where to start here.

Personally I'd like to drop the F7F and make the Pancake a teir 7 (This would be more appropriate to its development time in history as well as balance it better in the game. I'm also pretty sure the F7F was developed AFTER the Pancake. )

Improvements were also made to much of the Russian line. This is a slap in the face to American planes. The Russian planes were already great and this put the poorly represented American planes at even more of a disadvantage.

The additional planes added to the Chinese line is much appreciated. However, I do wish a companion line of non premium planes had also been made available. (Even if they were modified versions of American planes.)

New nose art was supposed to be added, but I did not see anything of interest on the planes I fly. Also, the poor spitfire still gets the ugliest paint of all.

(Personally, as far as paint goes, I'd like a yellow winged corsair variant like the F4F and

I know the development team put a lot of time into the PVE part of this patch. Sadley, this is something I will never use. Without any meaningful rewards, there is no reason to use this. Something that would change my opinion here would be the ability to fly any plane in the game. This way I could decide what plane I would like to work for and put in my hangar.

Overall the development team's hard work shows through. There are welcome additions in interface and control improvements. Also, Any time planes are added is a happy day. I would love to see even more prototye and X planes, especially in the teir 5 range. The matching system I'm pretty sure is moving in the right direction. Work is still needed on American planes be better represented as they were in history.

I'm happy to say the in the end I'm excited to see what we have in the patch and I'm excited for it to go live.

It's like this in 1.4 too though. I always thought it was meant to replicate how the smoke from the guns would trail behind the plane as it continues to move forward.

Yea I noticed that as well, often times in a turn the bullets seem to actually leave the plane from above it currently in game. I just was overwhelmed by how much more it does it on the Public test, so much that it impacted game play, because at times I could not see past them all lol.

1. roll limit option - forget what exactly its called, but the setting that limits the roll on aircraft at low altitude. It seems to be very broken. Was flying an IL at low altitude and all of a sudden couldn't maneuver. Not sure if something was changed or something broke but getting jammed in a straight line at 100m in a valley headed toward a hill, not fun.

2. GT's - this will be a fairly long section

a. Removal of HQ - I'm almost ecstatic at this because maybe now we won't have IL's and heavies rushing toward certain doom and actually take out AA guns.

b. AA guns - something that ties to this I'll cover later, but the addition of AA guns to targets that previously had none has made it suicidal at best for fighters at low altitudes, which would be less of a problem if there weren't planes like the zero that are low altitude fighters AND have low hit point pools. I'd suggest removing a few, dialing back the damage, the accuracy, or some combination of those. Flying into a spot with 3, just three of them resulted in my F7F getting torn up like I had flown toward the carrier group on hidden airbase.

c. GT HP scaling - I naturally wanted to test out ground targets, particularly in fighters. And honestly I was impressed when in PvE in a skua, I near earned the points for a thunder medal. So I figure why not try my wildcat with 6 bigger guns and rockets. Well, rockets did the trick, but it seemed like it struggled even on unarmored targets. I get it's not their priority, but even in the old system they were actually a little easier to take out a ship on harbor. bringing me to -

d. Armored targets - I understand if lighter armed fighters make little or no dent. I understand even if the heavy armed ones and light fighters can barely do damage and need a pass or two. But an IL with 37mm cannons can barely damage it? and as an added bonus even rockets and bombs have difficulty inflicting damage? It was actually easier to take an HQ out with just cannons then it is to take these with rockets.

Rear gunner - what did you guys do to rear gunners? because right now they seem absolutely ineffective. It's like their range has been halved or something. or I simply can't hear them firing but it sure seems like hey aren't doing anything at times they should. Their only appearing to open up at 200m, which is definitely shorter then before from what I can see. Thats going to have to change because it's not exactly hard to stay more then 200m out and light them up with oh say, a FW-190.

Ramming - despite complaints, it should certainly make those that complained about their GA getting rammed happy. IL decided to take my beaufighter head on, never touched me, I fired a pair of rockets and apparently missed, ended up colliding with him and he just flew straight though me. Prior to that I basically flew through a zero that turned into me in my P-39. Sort of on the fence with this one.

"Dynamic Cam" - kinda reminds me of the replays in Ace Combat 6, I'd actually like this in normal replays if it isn't being added already. Maybe throw in some others where the camera is in a spot and the plane zooms by more or less.

Weapon convergence - So far it seems to have made the wing mounted weapons more deadly, and given the P-51A some of its teeth back, still woefully underpowered compared to the wing mounted cannons of te 109, spitfire and 190's.

Mustang Mk-1 changes - All I'm going to say on this, is that if no one is complaining that this thing is overpowered, then at the VERY LEAST you can un-nerf the guns on the P-51A.

Bomb nerf - would have been nice to give us a heads up that you were reducing the damage of bombs and all - not sure why they were nerfed anyway.

Plane awards - been wanting this a while, been getting hard to track how many aces I have on which planes, as well as thunder medals, etc.

EDIT 1: GT's (again)

After some more testing, generally, it seems that tiers 1-3 ground targets are easy enough to take out, some are definetly harder then others but a pass or two is generally enough in a TSH or skua.

Tier 4 is a question mark. The BsH-2 was about on par with a 9 gun blenheim. not too hard, but probably harder then it should be, particularly for a GA

Tier 5 and 6 is when it really seems to start dropping off, what used to be some of the easiest targets now require more then one pass or a second IL following in line. Throw in armored targets and the lack of damage rockets and bombs seem to do to them, definetly verging on a problem.

Tier 7 and what little I've done of 8 so far shows that seems to show that the IL-10, and the similar set up of the IL-20 (haven't unlocked the twin 57's yet), seem to be the best suited for taking out ground targets. Better so then the IL-8 set up of 2 guns and 2 heavy cannons. However, GA at this tier seems to be nearly negligible for superiority points, aside from possibly seeing one with a higher score because they destroyed the last targets or the last of the health the first one missed/was unable to do.

All tiers, being in a GA and being low man on the totem poll in tier is now that much worse in terms of underpowered for the scale of weapons against GT's.

I think that GT's from tiers 4 up need either reductions in armor or HP, armored targets need an overhaul to not be nearly indestructible without multiple passes, rockets, and bombs.Or rockets and bombs need a major buff (or in the case of bombs unnerf) against ground targets, as well as increased damage from autocannons and guns against ground targets. I have no problem with aircraft being worth more then an entire ground target, but make the ground targets easy enough for a GA to destroy that its not still basically the fighters show.

Other than what has been noted above, here's my buck fifty on what I am seeing on the test server.

The mouse controls are shaky at first, however then had to be toned way down before they work properly for me.

The awards during the game are annoying like a pin ball machine or a better example, Dance-Dance Revolution. How many times does one need to hear "Ground Pounder" during the match?

The CT server and NA server WoWP game cache are the same. I would have thought the CT server would have its own cache file

Bot battles are not working for me. I waited many times and once 10 minutes trying to get into a bot match. However in a standard battle it takes 3 to 6 minutes for a match. I thought the bot battles were suppose to be fast MM creations?

Update 1.5 replays do not function. I get a wrong version error. So are you (WG) saying I am not to save my replays?

Below are my screen snapshots of the 1.5 update

Base views

Spoiler

New Aircraft Crew tab - At first I went where's my crew? Then I noticed the crew tab. You have to click the crew tab before you can mange your crews. I am not sure if this is an annoyance, have to wait and see.

Spoiler

Missions - At first it was weird seeing both the Russian and English language missions for the same thing. But a thing to note is the change for the gold missions. This is an hourly reset, not a day event. Yesterday WG deleted the Russian from the English language missions. Moot point now.

Spoiler

New Achievements - In some ways this seems good and bad. The good is the variance for having more awards other than ace, destroyer, and thunder. The bad is getting an award just for shooting at some one such as the direct hit award. Really?? We need a reward just for participating? Man our civilization is on a downward slope with this type of reward.

Spoiler

Intro Scene - say so loooong! Found the setting in the settings to totally get rid of this. Now we are back to the 1.3 update times.

Spoiler

Game load start comparisons - I like this change, it seems more direct with the numbers compared to the old method, less distracting.

Spoiler

Ground View

Spoiler

As is default

When the alt key is pressed. Note the GT identifiers as to what targets they are classified as in the match.

Superiority - This is a change. I sorta like the new way when compared to the old. At least you know how effective you are in the game. You will see the kills and what percentage you are or where in helping the team.

Spoiler

Maps Redesigns - They have re-design some of the maps, such as National Park. You wont recognize it any more. The changes on the NP map are too numerous to go into. Some of the maps have more GTs.

For example look at the mini map for this Bay as an example.

Spoiler

Edited by FlakValleyExpress, 08 August 2014 - 12:43 PM.

1.X WoWP veteran - Airborne Scout - Class of 1.0

Vae victis

Update 2.0 - It's not a bug, it's a feature

"Battle is the Great Redeemer. It is the fiery crucible in which true heroes are forged. The one place where all men truly share the same rank, regardless of what kind of parasitic scum they were going in."

Just fired up the CT a few minutes ago. The game starts you off with gunnery training but why the heck is there a long long que, I left after 7 minutes, for training against bots? This is a quick way to get truly new players to bypass the training.

Why doesn't the CT use our live game settings by default? I clicked on battle and the plane was uncontrollably twitchy with my joystick and the default mouse settings were even worse leading to a lawn dart.

Going to test a little bit more.

I used to have a handle on life until it broke off.

“The church is near but the road is icy, the tavern is far away but I will walk carefully”

After messing around with my joystick setting quite a bit it is playable.

The old overzealous censor we had back in beta is back and turning it off has no effect. In fact it is even worse than in beta and has to be fixed asap as chat is useless with the censoring of words and portions of words that are not swearing at least in English.

Tried the gunnery training again, the wait to do this is insane.

I used to have a handle on life until it broke off.

“The church is near but the road is icy, the tavern is far away but I will walk carefully”

Something I encountered on the test server that was a bit odd to me. With the tutorial set-up, you finish the first 2 and then go to the kill 10 bot thing. After that I researched a T-2 that could equip bombs which unlocked the ground attack tutorial, which is the last tutorial on the list, un-lockable at tier 2. I complete that and cruise along till I get a T-4 light fighter, which unlocks the dogfight tutorial, which use to be the second tutorial but is now the third. Aside from the fact the last tutorial can be unlocked at tier 2, the final one which is arguably the most important for most players, can not be done till tier 4, once I finished this tutorial it took me back into the ground attack tutorial which was already completed. I know that the tutorial is real easy but why not make the button gray out if it is already completed so someone does not hit continue thinking there was more to the tutorial they were doing, it can not be that difficult to code.

Just fired up the CT a few minutes ago. The game starts you off with gunnery training but why the heck is there a long long que, I left after 7 minutes, for training against bots? This is a quick way to get truly new players to bypass the training.

Why doesn't the CT use our live game settings by default? I clicked on battle and the plane was uncontrollably twitchy with my joystick and the default mouse settings were even worse leading to a lawn dart.

Going to test a little bit more.

That would be caused by a busy server, a lot of people trying to do it at one time, it is not something that would carry over to live. The Que window even stated the server was busy.

Just fired up the CT a few minutes ago. The game starts you off with gunnery training but why the heck is there a long long que, I left after 7 minutes, for training against bots? This is a quick way to get truly new players to bypass the training.

Why doesn't the CT use our live game settings by default? I clicked on battle and the plane was uncontrollably twitchy with my joystick and the default mouse settings were even worse leading to a lawn dart.

Going to test a little bit more.

hawkeyededic, on 08 August 2014 - 08:30 PM, said:

That would be caused by a busy server, a lot of people trying to do it at one time, it is not something that would carry over to live. The Que window even stated the server was busy.

That is no excuse, the server(s) should be ready for something like this.

I used to have a handle on life until it broke off.

“The church is near but the road is icy, the tavern is far away but I will walk carefully”

I would like to point out that the new system for Gold and EXP exclusive for the test server is so much better better than the old , I have been so frustrated over the past year that my test account was reset to an EU account and I would start fresh every time ( I have no active EU account to mirror ) Being able to free experience anywhere is awesome Great work and I hope you will stick with this for the next test session .. 50,000 Gold and what was it 1.2 million free XP, Love it you can start me fresh every-time like that .. I cant begin to express how happy I am for that ,,Great work !